Doctorow's March

From the book pages of your local newspaper on Easter Sunday: "the clinically rational, barely human surgeon Wrede Sartorius ... in one of the novel’s most eerie moments, uses his scalpel to puncture the hymen of a nurse who is about to surrender her virginity to him."

You let a dreadful 1970s pop novelist loose in the fields of history and the results are going to be predictable. Tasteless self parody.